On December 7 2013, Jeremy Bird, Barack Obama's National Field Director during the 2012 presidential election, gave a keynote speech on the fundamentals of community-based organizing to the Broadbent Institute's Municipal Political Action Conference.

Jeremy helped to build a people-powered election campaign based on strong volunteer organizing that propelled Barack Obama back to the White House.

About the Instructor/Host

Jeremy Bird is a founding partner at 270 Strategies and a longtime grassroots organizer with broad experience across domestic and international politics, labor, and policy. He helped launch 270 Strategies after serving most recently as the National Field Director for the 2012 re-election campaign of President Barack Obama, where he had primary responsibility for building a nationwide army of staff and volunteer organizers. Dubbed the campaign’s "Field General" by Rolling Stone magazine, Jeremy was listed among "The Obama Campaign’s Real Heroes" and has been cited as "a former Harvard divinity student who took to political organizing as though it were his higher calling." He is credited with helping establish a ground game and turnout machine that in 2012 "reproduced – through brute force, dedication and will – a turnout in the swing states that in some cases bested the campaign's remarkable performance of four years ago."

Session Overview

Saskatoon Change Makers, organized by Upstream and the Broadbent Institute, was an an evening of discussion and inspiration that considered the best ways to bring about positive change in the city of Saskatoon!

Mitch Stewart, principal at 270 Strategies, and President Obama's former Battleground States Director spoke to the crowd about how he got involved in politics.

Brian Topp recently completed a two-year stint as chief-of-staff to Alberta Premier Rachel Notley. During this period the Government of Alberta introduced a $15 minimum wage; appointed a gender-balanced Cabinet; replaced a system of regressive flat taxes with a progressive income tax system; laid out a responsible fiscal plan that rejected austerity; implemented an ambitious jobs plan; reformed the royalty system; ended predatory lending practices while strengthening the credit union system and ATB, Alberta's publicly-owned bank; and implemented a climate change leadership plan -- among many other important reforms. He is proud of all of this. He previously served as deputy chief-of-staff to Saskatchewan Premier Roy Romanow (not a bad list of accomplishments there, too). He has worked as a public affairs consultant and in the labour movement, and in a number of senior roles with the New Democratic Party of Canada under four leaders (Broadbent, McLaughlin, McDonough, and Layton). He is a graduate of McGill University, and was born and raised in Montreal.

The landmark survey commissioned by the Broadbent Institute is the first study of its kind and size to measure Canadians’ attitudes about voting system design and preference for electoral reform. The research, conducted by Abacus Data, found Canadians want the new government to keep its promise to change the voting system by an almost two to one margin and a larger margin prefers a proportional system to ranked ballots. Voting with a preferential ballot would have produced an even larger false majority in the 2015 Canadian General Election, the study also found.

On September 22 and 23, the Broadbent Institute hosted Progress Summit BC to chart a progressive path forward for the province in this critical election year. The first keynote was delivered by Law Foundation Professor of Aboriginal Justice and Governance at the University of Victoria, Val Napoleon. Watch her remarks and presentation below.

OTTAWA — Most Canadians think the way members of Parliament are elected needs to change and a system of proportional representation is the most preferred alternative, a landmark Canadian survey has found.

The large national survey of 2,986 Canadians conducted November 3 to 6 by Abacus Data for the Broadbent Institute is the first study of its kind and size to measure Canadians’ attitudes about voting system design and preference for electoral reform. The large sample allowed for robust estimates across regional, demographic and political subgroups. The Abacus study also asked those who voted in the 2015 Canadian General Election to rank a ballot that included the main political parties and generated data for 11 regions to estimate, with increased precision, the outcome of the Canadian election had it been run under different electoral systems.